t.pauluspsychologist (2025)

29/07/2020

“You always mistreat me!” When we let someone take advantage of us repeatedly, who is really mistreating us? Them...or is it us?

The first time it’s on them, but when it happens again, it’s often on us. Why do we neglect ourselves this way?

Usually, because we don’t see what we are doing. And second, because there’s a very beautiful fantasy we’d rather pay attention to instead of a painful reality.

It’s called externalization, because we imagine the cause of our problem it’s outside, instead of seeing that it’s inside. Externalization is a defense that can be hard to spot, but it definitely kills intimacy over time.

Example: a boy hopes his self centered twin brother will love him, so he lets him boss him around and mistreat him...believing a fantasy that his love for his brother will one day win him the love he wants. Meanwhile he grows resentful. Eventually he bursts into tears and throws himself on the ground refusing to play another of his brother’s games: “I always play with you but you never let me play what I want to play!” Instead of valuing his own preferences and accepting his brother’s mistreatment for what it is, he punishes himself for the rage he feels towards his brother by mistreating himself, becoming resentful, playing the victim, and projecting the blame for all of it onto his brother.

Other Examples: “I’m sorry I keep coming late...my wife takes forever to get ready and is always making me wait even when she knows i feel it’s important to be on time for church.”
Who is making this person wait and who is ignoring what’s important to him?

“You don’t value my offerings!! You keep consuming my online content even though you know I can’t go on doing this for free!” Who is not valuing this person’s online content?

As usual, big thanks to Jon Frederickson for teaching me to spot this defense.

18/07/2020

If someone feels unsafe it’s best to assess fear vs. anxiety. If they are afraid of something objective it’s fear. Something in the environment needs to change.

If they are afraid of a feeling or a thought, it’s anxiety. In this case, nothing in the environment needs to change, but the person may need help bearing their inner life. The best way to help them is to let them see they are in conflict with something inside, instead of taking on the projection and believing that you are the problem.

If we focus on our mixed feelings, we can experience what our feelings are communicating to us. But when other people’s feelings and projections trigger a reaction in us, we can get anxious and go to a a sado-masochistic/ master-servant enactment where we end up rescuing, persecuting, or becoming a victim and manipulate the person instead of treating them as an equal.

18/07/2020

What is it about someone having another opinion about reality that makes us anxious? What feelings get stirred up when we see someone else has their own mind?

Reality triggers feelings, which trigger anxiety, which triggers defense. Depending on our capacity, and how high feelings are, we can cross a threshold which then leads to a (usually) temporary regression in our mental function. Melanie Klein called this the paranoid schizoid position, something she identified happening as part of psychic development starting in infancy.

In this example it works like this: separate mind —> aggression/rage/anger —> guilt about aggression towards another human person + any other associated guilt for crimes real or unconsciously felt —> anxiety —> defenses of splitting pull apart positive and negative feelings —> negative feelings projected onto the person who is different —> conflict becomes between us and the person instead of between us and reality. Punishment for the unprocessed guilt: destroyed relationship / conflict between us and another person we could be in harmony with as a separate other.

The more burdened we are with old guilt about crimes real and imagined/felt, the more we have to punish ourselves or provoke punishment. There’s another way: look in with compassion at the truths we’d rather not see. What skeletons are in the closet? There’s a reason we’re upset, but it might not be what we think. And we can depend on others we trust to help us attend to that stuff instead of making it about other people and sowing seeds of destruction.

17/07/2020

Some of us guys* put up unconscious barriers to emotional closeness that kill intimacy in our relationships and leave us and our partners thinking we’re emotionally dead inside. We’re not. We just unconsciously put up barriers to closeness and detach to ward off feelings. Sometimes we’re hyper intellectual and treat relationships like engineering problems, so they die. We withhold emotion from others and don’t even see it. We’re what Davanloo called “highly resistant patients” in therapy. Thank God, Davanloo came up with a method of therapy that addresses this problem head on and helps us breakthrough to the painful feelings we didn’t know we were covering up.........
Too bad we usually don’t go to therapy until someone calls us on it, or even threatens to leave... we’re good solid guys underneath it all with a lot of love and capacity to give, actually. We just unconsciously and passive aggressively treat you the way an emotionally distant parent treated us. We’re definitely worth giving a chance, but we do sometimes need an ultimatum before we have suffered our resistance enough to want to change. Kindness alone won’t cure it, we have to see our defenses, count the cost, and make a choice to open up to what’s underneath.

Check out the podcast interview where I talk about this on

*not just dudes do this. Women do it too.

16/07/2020

Bowlby was right. Feelings are fully physical even as they simultaneously and mysteriously go beyond and below the physical. They begin in the body. And as long as we have a heart beat there remains in us an effective force for emotional healing. We can choose to side with the healing over and against the forces of resistance we’ve adapted in isolation, self preservation, and survival. Then we can go toward the fear and into what we feel.❤️

16/07/2020

Thank you, Patricia Coughlin for your wonderful work in helping people heal.

When feelings are high, unfelt healthy guilt is high, anxiety is high, and primitive, borderline, and even near psychotic defenses are high. This appears to be what’s happening in our country actually. To heal, we have to regulate the anxiety and humanely face the unpleasant and painful feelings and truths we might rather avoid.

05/06/2020

Feelings are rising all over the country. With mixed feelings comes anxiety and then comes defense.

The feelings about reality will heal this country. I believe it. But defenses unchecked could and will do further damage. I’m seeing a lot of these defenses in myself and others so I’m posting this to do a small part of what I can right now to help. If we can see our unconscious defenses we can overcome them and many of us can learn to tolerate and then embrace the unpleasant feelings underneath along with the realities they point to.

The bond of love that unites human beings and animates being itself has been wounded and bleeding for a long time. In our country it was injured and broken between white and black initially and endlessly and repeatedly in a big and fundamental way. We all know it. Let’s do our best to face reality with humility. I believe this post applies to all people, but is today directed mostly at my white friends to help better facilitate the guilt that drives our potential to take ownership, responsibility, and longings for authentic repair. It will also help you differentiate what’s yours and what’s been unconsciously handed down that you don’t like. If you can’t tolerate your feelings but feel the anxiety, just breathe.

05/06/2020

🚨 Clinicians! This weekend only, check out the a webinar featuring lots of video based case material from Steve Shapiro, Ph.D. Learn principles of short term dynamic psychotherapy, how to help your patients see and move past defenses and anxiety and into healing, and get those CE’s! Link in bio!!

“Ironically, many clients interfere with the very progress they seek either through their own resistance to the psychotherapy process or because their anxiety is too high and there is too much dysregulation to use the process effectively. Not infrequently, they terminate prematurely before reaching their goals. This results in tragic consequences for the client, as well as frustration and a sense of failure for the therapist. While clients enter treatment with conscious motivation, resistance is unconscious and, therefore, difficult to address without a coherent system. Therapists typically interpret resistance in a personal way becoming confused, frustrated, and hopeless, with a tendency to hold the client responsible and label him/her as “unmotivated or resistant”. Participants will learn to move beyond resistance and simple symptom management into deep, transformational processes that releases resources of health and resilience. Learn to accelerate treatment using innovative techniques that implore clients to abandon chronic coping patterns that were once necessary but have long outlived their usefulness and are now causing untoward suffering”

02/06/2020

Black Lives Matter

22/05/2020

In this talk packed with clinical material, Dr. Tom Paulus will use clinical video, skill building, PowerPoint, and live Q & A to help us begin learning how to modify ISTDP principles to fit the needs of patients based on 3 different resistant systems. Participants will:

-Learn different defenses common to each system of resistance (high resistance with isolation of affect, repression, ego fragile resistance).

-Learn the relationship between anxiety thresholds and each system of resistance

-Learn how patients in each system manage conflicting feelings with defenses

-Learn when to use a graded approach to ISTDP

Date: Saturday May 23, 2020
Time: 12-3pm PST, 3-6pm EST
Cost: $30 for licensed professionals, $10 for students/associates. Please make payment via Venmo to Tami-Chelew, Paypal or Zelle via tamichelew@gmail.com.

To register, please rsvp to info@istdpsandiego.com. After payment and rsvp, you will be sent the zoom link and a privacy agreement.

26/04/2020

Facing avoided realities with compassion, together. That’s what we do in therapy.

18/04/2020

Love makes life livable and good.

Quote from Redemptor Hominis. **“Man” is a translation of hominis (human being or person)

t.pauluspsychologist

29/07/2020

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16/07/2020

05/06/2020

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